Technology - On Going Projects

OmegaCAM

Figure 1:OmegaCAM re-integration at the Paranal Observatory's Assembly Hall. The instrument housing (orange cylinder, on the right) is placed on its cart. The two cabinets on the left host the instrument electronics (except the detector system's front-end electronics).

OmegaCAM is the wide-field imager for the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), built by a Consortium of Research Institutes from Germany, The Netherlands and Italy in collaboration with ESO.

It consists of a mosaic of 32 2K x 4K CCDs, that will cover the focal plane of the telescope with more that 256 million pixels. The main purpose of VST-OmegaCAM is to perform survey in support of the VLT scientific programme. Further, given the large FoV of the camera, it will be possible to perform research on rare or very peculiar objects. The Astronomical Observatory of Padova participates to the OmegaCAM Project with full responsibility on the Instrument Software and for the management of the documentation.

Construction and preliminary testing in Europe of OmegaCAM ended in 2006 with the completion of the Preliminary Acceptance Europe (PAE) awarded by ESO. In August 2008 the camera has been shipped to the VLT Observatory in Paranal (Chile) where is has been re-integrated and tested. Commissioning of the camera is now foreseen to take place in the second half of 2009.

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